If you haven't already seen today's xkcd cartoon, I hope you will take a few minutes to look at some interesting, some amusing and some appalling information about how much different things cost in 2011 dollars.

If, like me, you think that dollars or whatever token form money takes represent human time and energy, then xkcd has seriously underestimated the total economic productivity of the human race so far at $2,396,500,000,000,000.

All this reminds me of a question: If we trade something that is consumable or perishable or ephemeral for money, why do we expect the money to be eternal? to forever be savable and exchangeable? With 7 billion people harboring such expectations, is it any wonder the accumulations are suffocating us?

The subtext here is the Wall Street bailouts and foreclosure wave. All Democratic leaders essentially supported it. This is why there’s grumbling, but no alternatives. The Democrats have really just started their internal debate over big money. https://t.co/8XKgqvJYn2

Brookings Institution fellow Elaine Kamarck on Friday compared President Trump's rhetoric on immigration to "the boy who cried wolf. I think that the president at this point with immigration is like the boy who cried wolf," Kamarck, who also directs the Center for Effective Public Management, told Hill.TV's Jamal Simmons on "What America's Thinking."

What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”....“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual.